"Our sense of honesty," he writes, "repels us from attaching faith to the belief spread in that most corrupt age." Yet the authorities urging one motive are commonly those urging the other, and Gregorovius quotes those that suit him, without considering that, if he is convinced they lie in one connection, he has not the right to assume them truthful in another.
The contemporary, or quasi-contemporary writers upon whose "authority" it is usual to show that Cesare Borgia was guilty of both those revolting crimes are: Sanazzaro, Capello, Macchiavelli, Matarazzo, Sanuto, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, Guicciardini, and Panvinio.
A formidable array! But consider them, one by one, at close quarters, and take a critical look at what they actually wrote: SANAZZARO was a Neapolitan poet and epigrammatist, who could not--his times being what they were--be expected to overlook the fact that in these slanderous rumours of incest was excellent matter for epigrammatical verse.

Therefore, he crystallized them into lines which, whilst doing credit to his wit, reveal his brutal cruelty.

No one will seriously suppose that such a man would be concerned with the veracity of the matter of his verses--even leaving out of the question his enmity towards the House of Borgia, which will transpire later.

For him a ben trovato was as good matter as a truth, or better.

He measured its value by its piquancy, by its adaptability to epigrammatic rhymes.
Conceive the heartlessness of the man who, at the moment of Alexander's awful grief at the murder of his son--a grief which so moved even his enemies that the bitter Savonarola, and the scarcely less bitter Cardinal della Rovere, wrote to condole with him--could pen that terrible epigram: Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sexte, putemus, Piscaris notum retibus ecce tuum.
Consider the ribaldry of that, and ask yourselves whether this is a man who would immolate the chance of a witticism upon the altar of Truth.
It is significant that Sanazzaro, for what he may be worth, confines himself to the gossip of incest.